A documentary on the effort to produce an original arcade-style game for the Tandy Color Computer platform.

Monday, June 30, 2014

Fahrfall Revisited

A bit more than two years ago, Fahrfall was a winner in the Retrochallenge 2012 Winter Warmup. Since then, I have shown Fahrfall at three VCF events, four mini Maker Faire events, three CoCoFEST! events, and a number of other small events here and there. Many people like the game, and some people absolutely love it. Still, I've always felt that Fahrfall remains unfinished.

The Retrochallenge 2014 Summer Challenge starts tomorrow. I already intended to participate, and I even had a few other good ideas brewing this time around. Still, at some point I got a couple of brainstorms about some possible improvements that I could make to Fahrfall. I don't think that I will necessarily be able to have exactly the features that I envisioned two years ago. But, I do think that I can make some significant improvements and have a better game than what we have now. So, I've decided to return to Fahrfall for this summer's Retrochallenge competition.

In the meantime, I've also been putting some thought into how to produce Fahrfall game cartridges. Writing the code and even producing circuit boards never seemed like big problems. But, shaping plastic has been a bit of a mystery to me. However, I have recently learned a bit on that topic and I hope to share some of that over the coming weeks. I like the results I've been getting quite a bit -- I think you will be impressed!

So, improvements to Fahrfall combined with some arts & craft work -- fun for the whole family. There might even be more surprises along the way. If you want to see how it turns out, then you'll have to stay tuned... :-)

1 comment:

Slow start today, but I did do something -- when you press the button during the "you only live once" screen, now it will immediately start the game instead of waiting for the timeout (~3 seconds). Impatient gamers will be pleased!

Also, in the process of making that happen I found a bug in Fahrfall's keyboard handling code. Flags are used to indicate input directions and the button press. The joystick routine was fine, but the keyboard routine didn't reinitialize the flags properly! It's amazing it worked at all... :-)